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Can anyone here who had an overall happy experience during their primary and secondary schooling comment as to what your experience was like? What type of schools did you attend? How were your relationships with your teachers and peers? How involved were your parents in your schooling?
A private hippie school, then prep school. Somewhere people who grew up in Manhattan private school circles would have heard of, but not like Dalton or Trinity. My school was coed; both my brother and sister went to single-sex schools, for no particular reason.
Some people are interested in demographics. The school was perhaps 5% black, 5% visibly Latino (hard to tell, could have been more), 30% Asian (two thirds east, one third south, a couple of southeast here and there) and 60% white, including Arabs. Of the whites, maybe half were Jewish or half-Jewish and most of the rest were Italian, mixed-white (like, Brazilian mom, Swiss dad, or blonde mom from the Midwest and Italian dad, that kind of thing). Perhaps 10% of the student body, maybe a little less, were the predominantly but not entirely white kids of European or Canadian expats in NYC. I had more Catholic background friends from before prep school and from our local neighbourhood, but wealthy people who have those backgrounds in NYC tended, in my experience, to prefer to send their children to the Catholic private schools even though they were personally largely secular (I don’t think any remained or became religious). There were some WASPs of the regatta sort, but not many; again in my experience most of the very old family WASPish people I grew up around knew what schools they were sending their kids to from birth, and it wasn’t ours. A lot of those people I knew as a kid went to tier-1 schools or to boarding school.
The school was relatively academic. Probably not as much as my dad would have liked. College admissions stats were mostly impressive except for the occasional off year, but again more like tier-2 than tier-1 of Manhattan prep schools. Because the demographics of the school were less old money than some other Manhattan prep schools there was less of an Ivy at all costs bias for the smartest kids, so people went all over the country, except for those of us who stayed in the city, of course. There were some super rich kids, and some poorer kids (in truth middle class), but most parents were upper middle class by general standards, including mine for the majority of my time there until maybe the last year.
Pretty good. Friend groups formed at fell apart pretty quickly. As in every school there were social hierarchies, but bullying was relatively rare and the school was very tough on it when it happened. I remember my teachers being nice, kind people who with a few exceptions mostly cared. Classes were always full of a lot of intellectual debate among the ~30% of people who cared. We had many clubs and activities, ran mock presidential debates and elections, played sports semi-locally, boring normal high school stuff. I was extremely successful in one activity, participated in a few others. If you wanted to do something weird or different that few or no other kids did they would help you find whatever league/organization/etc you needed in the city, or would have a relationship with other prep schools where you could do it.
The salacious stuff happened, people (a small minority of people) started doing coke in school bathrooms when we were maybe 14 or 15, threw huge parties when their parents were away on weeknights, sometimes stuff would go down and the teachers would try to figure out what happened. The Euro expats were always the most into that because their parents often seemed to leave them for long periods.
I started high school at the zenith of Gossip Girl’s popularity, and while that was based loosely on Brearley/Collegiate there were definitely a lot of people at our school who felt that should be their life and wanted to LARP as if it was. The reality was much more lame since the vast majority of us really did have parents who cared, but there were moments that stick with me like an indoor pool party where we probably drank $50,000 of someone’s parents’ vintage champagne, finding (bad) clubs only happy to let dumb rich kids in to spend thousands of dollars on bottle service with suspicious fake IDs and so on.
Sexually it was pretty prudish for a liberal elite school. I wonder if this was already zillennial sexual conservatism beginning in earnest but I remember my ex-hippie parents being mildly surprised that all three of their children waited until they were in long term relationships in their senior year or in college. (Yes, this was a topic of conversation in our household; if you’ve ever watched Easy A, my parents are Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in that movie, they watched it and agree.) There were a couple of hot teachers in their twenties who were known for hitting up former female students after they graduated, I remember that not seeming a big deal to me at the time, but again it didn’t happen to anyone in my social circle.
Not hugely involved? They came to parent teacher meetings two or three times a year (whenever they happened). They had an additional meeting when I started applying to college, then one more that also had me in it. That was pretty much it. There were some helicopter moms who could be found in the lobby every other day waiting to speak to one teacher or another, but I don’t think it did them much good.
I wish my parents had been slightly more involved because I was very shy and unconfident but could probably have made a valiant-if-unlikely attempt at HYPS (never applied) if really pushed, but I got into a very good college anyway and it hasn’t damaged my life in any way.
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